sovietswag

Scared the shit out of me!!!!! Lmfao

Fuckkkk yes to Fishmans long season!!!

Haha well there is an exciting movie about concrete coming out, “The History of Concrete” by John Wilson. Surely the superfans are studying up

Hey friend, if it helps, every “song” you make will eventually become a symbol and memory of a time in your life. It doesn’t have to be good. Sometimes these sounds have even more fidelity than text when it comes to capturing your emotional state and thoughts at the time. I didn’t realize that for a while but in retrospect all of the “it sounds bad” and “I didn’t finish it” didn’t matter

Part of my training for doing "engine room checks" on a boat involved checking for any unusual smells, e.g. fuel leak, burning oil (from generator/engine), burning coolant (from generator/engine), or burning rubber (from sea chest raw water impeller). All of the components in there are equipped with sensors[1] that measure levels, temperature, etc. Perhaps there is room for a new olfactory sensor there? Aside from avoiding catostrophic issues like fire and engine or generator failure, it's also important to not pump out[2] any water from the compartment into the ocean if it's contaminated with oil, fuel, or coolant (the laws about this are super strict).

[1] There are digital sensors that are readable directly from the pilothouse by the captain which are rigged to automated alarms, as well as manual sensors (e.g. a pressure dial) that are readable from the engine room itself, for redundancy. So I don't think an olfactory sensor would replace the unusual smell check, but it could maybe augment it.

[2] The "bilge pump" is used to pump out water from the bilge (bottom floor cavity of engine room). To be honest on my vessel the policy is to never turn on the bilge pumps in the engine room at all because the risk of dumping contaminants is too high. But I still thought to mention this just in case there's an idea there.

Ha! I just had a debate about this with my friend. A certain ferry company uses a big Google Sheet to track where all of its vessels are currently docked in their home port, as well as which employee is assigned to which vessel for the day, etc (it's very information dense with color coding, and employees check it daily to get their vessel assignment). My friend thought this was completely unacceptable for a big company, and that they should build a bespoke software for this purpose. I think that it was a brilliant idea to use Google Sheets, it already solves all of the difficult problems and obviates the need to have an inhouse software development team or an expensive contract. I buried my hubris deep underground

You can also find a lot of this information on NOAA's nautical charts. https://devgis.charttools.noaa.gov/pod. These charts (along with radar) are what ships actually use to navigate. Here's a captain demonstrating the charts on the New York Harbor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Si_kdo6MUE

I wonder what you'd think about this video from Gary's Economics about the housing crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTlUyS-T-_4

It feels to me like a good faith counterargument to the YIMBY build more housing line of thought, so might be an interesting perspective

Oh wow thanks for writing out that summary of Sockwell's talk. I had a sort of similar line of thought a few years ago which I haven't followed since, but this just brought me back. https://josh8.com/blog/personal_computing.html I was musing about the point on which technologies one ought to use for writing personal (or FOSS) software vs. corporate software like in the talk, but also whether the ethos we bring to the table between the two should differ -- i.e. 'software as a soap bubble' rather than only allowing yourself to write scalable and maintainable programs that are generalized for re-use. It's as if a whole class of programs which would help us Personally Compute never come into existence because of this mindset. I think the AI vibe coding thingy majingies are not too bad of an antidote to this actually

That quote about conjecture reminds me of a big point from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author suggests that 'science' / 'the scientific method' don't actually account for the process by which ideas/hypotheses come into existence, science only comes into play once the hypothesis appears (from whence does it appear?). He calls that magic smoke 'Quality'. (Using the language you cited, I guess we would be asking about where the conjecture itself comes from). I'm realizing now that this is tangential to your point, sorry, but thanks for posting this interesting comment.

Hm, the author explicitly pointed out the same:

What confuses me is that other people can form images in their minds. Are all those with character amnesia also aphantasic? That can't be, given that aphantasics amount to less than 5% of the population, while a much larger number of people forget how to write (70% of teenage participants in a Chinese TV show were unable to write the word "toad"!).

They were discussing their aphantasia as a precursor to other very interesting points, e.g. about how "seeing" a character in your mind isn't enough to be able to draw it, --> verbatim traces and gist traces.

Lollll ‘dd’ with autocorrect will be a hoot

You should take a listen to Tomita as well then! There is so much beautiful music in the world

I was expecting something snobby but this was actually a very interesting view into the mind of a self-actualized person. I guess this is what happens if you keep working hard and don't burn out! Thanks for posting this

Holy crap this was my operating systems professor!!! I was not expecting to see this here... big smile on my face. He was a great teacher :).

Archive.org has a PHP Software Engineer position they posted recently, may come in handy once you have a more stable setup with your computer

https://workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/default/mdf/recruitment/...

Best wishes and good luck with everything

Communicating Sequential Processes (Hoare), The Next 700 Programming Languages (Landin), As We May Think (Bush), Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style (Backus)

And this seems to be a cool course: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/34992/assignments/syllabu... > This course examines papers every computer scientist should have read, from the 1930s to the present. It is meant to be a synthesizing experience for advanced students in computer science: a way for them to see the field as a whole, not through a survey, but by reliving the experience of its creation. The idea is to create a unified view of the field of computer science, for students who already know something about it, by replaying its entire evolution at an accelerated frame rate.

You’re on the right path my friend, hang on to the feeling that drove you to write this. Not everyone has it, and you may even find yourself having woken up with it missing one day. So use it while you have it

YES I FOUND IT, article on the same topic, not in the context of computers: https://thehealthygp.com/2021/04/28/why-i-stopped-using-the-...

Why I stopped using the word “just” and why the #justaGP narrative has to stop

Random tip... I noticed the volume sliders only take effect when you stop dragging the knob. You can use the 'oninput' event for the slider to set its value as the user moves it around. Something like:

volume_slider.oninput = function() { audio.volume = volume_slider.value; }

I sometimes wonder if statistics are like a pane of glass that allow the light of god (the true nature of things) to pass through, while logic/rationalism is the hubris of man playing god. I.e. statistics allow us to access/use the truth even if we don’t understand why it’s so, while rationalism / rule-based methods are often a folly because our understanding is not good enough to construct them.

This is an interesting avenue to add to my search of “where the experts hang out”. I tried to reflect on it here: https://josh8.com/blog/mailing_lists.html (As you can infer from the title, I decided that ‘mailing lists’ is one good answer).

I also had a brief discussion about the subject with an older person I respect, and this is what he had to say:

Interesting post. I think you've hit on the central issue: where are the experts? > Back in the day, USENET was kind of the hotspot for that kind of thing; these days, it's mostly cranks and luddites; a few folks are still around, but it's just not what it once was. >The challenge is tapping into the current set of experts; the thing is, TUHS and COFF are great for talking to the older generation, but (and I think that Doug, Ken and Rob at least would admit this) they're mostly retired and have handed the torch off to the next batch. So where are THOSE people? > I think that there is no central online presence for that group like there was for the previous generation with USENET. I mostly chat with them at conferences or idly on social media, but the real work is being done more or less independently. To the extent that folks are communicating about it, I think it's mostly point-to-point. :-(

You can use the US embargo on Cuba as a case study -- see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJETjgJM-Q4. The conclusion is roughly that the sanctions did not work, they only strengthened Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union, as well as serving to unite the citizens of Cuba against a common enemy and thus consolidating support for Fidel Castro. Another comment makes the same point about Iran and China today

It turns out that there is a lot of discourse out there about "semantic newlines", under a few different names. So far the names I've seen are:

- One Sentence Per Line (OSPL) - Semantic Line Breaks (SemBr) - Semantic Linefeeds - Ventilated Prose - Semantic newlines

Reading through the pages below was helpful in getting a better idea of what language people use to discuss this. They're mostly historical retrospectives or arguments for the merit of semantic newlines.

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line https://ramshankar.org/blog/posts/2019/semantic-line-breaks https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose https://discuss.python.org/t/semantic-line-breaks/13874 https://discuss.python.org/t/one-sentence-per-line-for-peps-... https://sembr.org https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-recommended-practices/...

(Actually I think one-sentence-per-line denotes something slightly different from semantic-line-breaks, not that I know what that difference is).

This sounds like texinfo (invoke via the ‘info’ command). Fun fact ironically a lot of the original groff documentation is written in texinfo, see: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-10/msg00107.ht...

(Not the person you asked) but it helps to realize that vim in "insert" mode is just like any other text editor you know, you can use your arrow keys and the delete button to edit your document. You will get annoyed pretty quickly navigating with arrow keys and no mouse cursor, so you might search up "how do I jump the end of this damned line!" (hint: it's the $ sign). As you edit documents you will get more and more annoyed and search up more shortcuts which you will be happy to incorporate into your life. This is what worked for me, anyways.

Finally, an opportunity to share a series from one of my favorite lecturers :). This is a set of lectures on the Critique from Robert Paul Wolff: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5GAeBZerO-RuKBI1IqHZz...

He jokes that he keeps a copy of the Critique on his nightstand and reads it before bed to relax lol.

He also has series on Marx, Freud, and ideological critique.

Good reference for that: https://jameshfisher.com/2016/11/27/c-k-and-r/

This was also used to implement variadic functions like printf before varargs, see https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/20517

Needs to mention afplay for playing audio! You can easily use this to make a command-line MP3 player.

Others have mentioned the “say” utility for speech synthesis. There is a lot you can do with it, it supports the TUNE format, which allows you to "shape the overall melody and timing of an utterance... for example ... to make an utterance sound as if it is spoken with emotion".

See: Apple's Speech Synthesis Programming Guide, https://josh8.com/blog/img/speech-synthesis.pdf

I also wrote more about this here: https://josh8.com/blog/commandline-audio-mac.html

There was a comment here earlier explaining how many modest/humble/non-confrontational/etc qualities portrayed as reflections of good character in this article by PG come from a place of privilege. I think it’s gone now, does anybody have a copy of it / is the author around? It was probably unnecessarily mean but it was insightful for me and made me reflect. Would appreciate any help finding it, thanks